"Never mind the fact that the iPod turned the entire music industry on its head. Never mind the fact that most successful notebooks today resemble designs first popularized by Apple. Never mind the fact that the blueprint of the modern day smartphone remains the original iPhone. Never mind the fact that competitors are scrambling wildly to copy the success and design of the iPad. Forget all of these things, because when it comes to Apple, the 'what have you done for me lately?' mentality reigns supreme."

I think Commodore was just being cheap. The Commodore 64 basically (haha) used the same BASIC as its predecessor the VIC-20. It's strange to imagine them releasing a computer with some nifty chips (video & sound) and no BASIC commands to make use of them, but they did.

I used to have a BASIC translation poster. It listed (haha) a number of commands and how they were implemented on a number of home computers. The Commodore 64 often had to do with PRINTing some character string or POKEing a memory location.

Not everybody was happy with Simons' BASIC (I liked it), but it would have been a huge improvement over BASIC 2.0 and it made it easy to do graphics, sounds, sprites and redefined character sets. It also still left a lot of memory free for the program.